Distantiation

All is quiet on the Sound. The lunar light is airing out the houses. The big house was never menage but always a menagerie, a collection of party animals sustaining oblivion to their own currents. At what moment did the orchestra begin sliding toward exhaustion and playing out of tune? At which moments were interruptions decisive, crucial, critical? Momentary interruptions: a phone call in the middle of dinner or lunch; having to stop for gas on the way to the Plaza Hotel; being called away from your interlocutor just when you are about to answer her question; a great flock of white sheep running down Fifth Avenue. The momentary interruption will come to closure, will dissolve here and reform there, interrupting the current of speech bodying forth as a conversation young people in their very late twenties must be having. In the mean time, in between time . . . . Between the past--the green light at the end of her dock was a star, was already behind him--and the future--the colossal significance of that light had gone beyond her--there is the present tense of the dream. ("Has the verb 'to dream' a present tense? How does one learn to use this?") The absence of Gatsby's imagination had itself to be imagined, like a rose absolving itself of itself. He had arrived earlier, the fantastic rumors about him had preceded him successfully, had brought the middle west into the east for a moment. The invasion of this responsive being was made possible by a delay of movement momentarily taking place elsewhere. Our reponses to his responsiveness have yet to be taken backwards toward the completion of a promise of life. The transcendental seismography required for tracking and marking the delays of Teutonic migrations of irregular verbs can no longer be delayed or halted. Interruptive irruptions of heightened sensitivity are rumoring the valley of ashes, stirring up impenetrable clouds and screening obscure operations from your sight. The great panic has become even greater since the Great War, increasing greatly the Schuldigsein in between time.

Extending the body with metal and wire has made a colossal body, automobilizing and teleophonically transporting itself through the day and the night, from East to West Egg. This extension and distension of the body is wired for sound. The expansion of the city is incalculable, imponderable, massive humanity in search of a conversation. The index and directory of electronic transference is a tabulation of proper names attached to numbers, a book which had long since made possible the party lines of cocktails filling the empty spaces of the time-table in the summer of 1922. Inspirited by electric speech, currents of desire discharge themselves as monetary affection, taking and receiving calls from afar, over yonder, right here. Cool voices come over the telephone; so do harsh and dry ones. They may even belong to the same person. People are moods. Within the constant electronic flow all voices are remissive, suspended in a roaring silence. The interval of waiting links and breaks the interlocutors, momentarily, as each one listens in on the other, waiting, on this road or promontory, inside this room where the telephone never rings, waiting for an accident to happen. A motley variety of transferences are set-into-work: a rendezvous with a mistress; an invitation to tea; an argument about selling a car; arranging for more whiskey to be sent up so that the party can reach its peak and begin its decline. How far does the chain of calls go back? How long has the past been corrupting the present? Busy signals synchronize heartbeats and return all calls to the operator, the anonymous, digitless I and ear, the one for whom all this occurs. The long distance that disconnected the unbroken series of successful gestures denominated as "Gatsby" shall remain irreducible, great. What would have come through in the call for which Gatsby was waiting? Daisy's withdrawal had always been in the air, she had always been kept away, yonder, inside of his ghostly heart. Pneumatically buoyed, floating under the raw sunlight, he was safeguarding the alterity that removed and displaced him from the story forever. The call had reached out to that which had already outreached it. ("The telephone has exceeded all narrativity, a thing beyond fiction's most self-declaring fiction, the fairy tale, which could not itself reach for the telephone.")

Incidents and names are collisions of conscience in large numbers of slow-thinking individuals whose interior rules no longer act as brakes on their desires. The odds of meeting one just as careless as yourself have increased greatly since the Great War. Abrupt stops, shifts in direction, faltering, wavering tragically and always disappearing around the next bend. These machines flicker in the metropolitan twilight, reducing the longest distances to the shortest intervals, extending the nearness by making it disappear. The large yellow metallic insect must be fed intravenously from long tubes by an ashen, greenfaced anemic, fueling the engine of death in the cool twilight. There was no way for him to absorb the shock; it dissolved him into the valley of ashes and returned him to the motherless earth underneath the gasoline station. The crack-up was the final breakdown of his nerves, the opening of a sickness unto death that afternoon. Wilson's inquiries about the car were the tracings of an itinerary of compulsive behaviour, a man in overdrive on foot, keeping faith beneath the watchful eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. How many lives must be cleared away and made to disappear before the event can be forgotten? The ontological difference between the sick and the well dissociated husband and wife, mistress and lover, better and worse, black and white. With these borders submerged, one egg is as good or bad as another. The sick are different from you and me. The recklessness of large sums of money renders the body parts interchangeable, increasing greatly the circuits of desirable suffering for the chance to hear one thrilling word. The blue coupe and the yellow Rolls carried bodies attached to proper names, whose denominations of "mistress," "wife," "lover" and "polo player" kept the road open and allowed the meandering explorers to occasionally slide westward toward the edge of the continent. The deaths of Gatsby and the Wilsons were merely casual events in that crowded summer, marked by a narrator who himself was preparing future readers to take over the burden of guilt and blaze a trail by deciphering the wake of hope. The foul dust exhausted them all, yet we are kept awake and waiting for the hour of profound human change. In the morning, in the evening, ain't we got fun?

History is now and America. The marshes and muddy swamps under the huge black knotted tree, nourished by ceaseless rain and new silences, made the irregular blue lawn surrounding Gatsby's house reflect the earliest morning star. How close is a star to the moon? How far is the earth from the star that is close to the moon? The future, that year by year recedes before us, is the past. The dis-enchantment with every object in the world returns us, outreached, outstretched, to the horizon of ecstatic vision. The luminous proximity of the green light had to give way to the distant luminosity of the moon: the lunar insides of a ghostly heart. The nothingness of the horizon is commensurate only with the power of the possible, an ecstasy ecstatically rapturous, unlevelled, heterogeneous to any person, place, or thing. As the inessential houses become boats, then trees, then islands, the republic rolls away and the dreamer is returned to the dream.

The enchanted moment makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence already in repetition, already having disavowed today, yesterday, and tomorrow. The old sailors in the new world are ahead of themselves in mourning, passively practicing the capacity for wonder, whispering to that other who has preceded them. To go beyond is to go back, as Gatsby was summoned by the future to the past. His anterior arrival eluded him, the enigma of motion that made him possible, gorgeous, was already underway to the language that would undo him--bring him just within the current of the present. How long does it take for an enchanted object to diminish in stature? The imperfected tension of the present holds us in reserve, preserving us for something perfect. We are stretched out and given over to that which takes us under, overtaken by the immeasurable sky and the green breast of the forest.

© Michael Garbarini

Bio: Michael Garbarini is a professor of literature, philosophy, history, communications, drama, etc., at several universities in the Sacramento area. For the Actor's Studio of Sacramento, he directed Endgame which was voted best play of the year by The Sacramento Bee.